The MRC@25: The Worst Media Bias of 1990

Each morning, the Media Research Center is showcasing the most egregious bias we have uncovered over the years — four quotes for each of our 25 years, 100 quotes total — all leading up to our big 25th Anniversary Gala on September 27. (Click here for ticket information)

We’ve already published the worst quotes of 1988 and 1989; today, the worst of 1990. Highlights include: Time magazine saluting Mikhail Gorbachev as “the communist Pope and the Soviet Martin Luther;” CBS finding “nostalgia” for the Berlin Wall; and Knight Ridder’s economics reporter giving this slanted take on the 1980s: “Reaganomics delivered a feast to the greedheads and starvation to the poor.”

“The bottom line is more tax money is going to be needed. Just how much will be the primary issue on the agenda when Congressional leaders meet with the President later today, Wednesday, May the 9th, 1990. And good morning, welcome to Today. It’s a Wednesday morning, a day when the budget picture, frankly, seems gloomier than ever. It now seems the time has come to pay the fiddler for our costly dance of the Reagan years.”— Bryant Gumbel opening NBC’s Today, May 9, 1990.

“[C]ountless liberal analysts over the last five years have documented time and again how Reaganomics delivered a feast to the greedheads and starvation to the poor....[The Gilded Age and The Roaring Twenties] were marked by the same kinds of excesses as the 1980s — gross concentrations of wealth in the hands of a tiny privileged elite, achieved primarily by deliberate Republican policies that left most Americans behind while debt, greed, and conspicuous consumption soared out of control.”— Robert Rankin, national economics correspondent for Knight-Ridder Newspapers, in the July 22, 1990 Philadelphia Inquirer.

“He [Mikhail Gorbachev] is simultaneously the communist Pope and the Soviet Martin Luther, the apparatchik as Magellan and McLuhan. The Man of the Decade is a global navigator.”— Time Senior Writer Lance Morrow, January 1, 1990.

“Few tears will be shed over the demise of the East German army, but what about East Germany’s eighty symphony orchestras, bound to lose some subsidies, or the whole East German system, which covered everyone in a security blanket from day care to health care, from housing to education? Some people are beginning to express, if ever so slightly, nostalgia for that Berlin Wall.”— CBS reporter Bob Simon on the March 16, 1990 Evening News.

Check back each morning for more classic bias quotes, or visit our “25th Anniversary” section for the entire collection.

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